Millennial expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment in Neukölln. They are young digital creatives, freelancers without too many constraints. They have a passion for food, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and Berlin’s twenty-four-hour party scene. Their ideal existence is also that of an entire generation, lived out on Instagram, but outside the images they create for themselves, dissatisfaction and ennui burgeon. Their work as graphic designers becomes repetitive. Friends move back home, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism during the refugee crisis proves fruitless. And in that picture-perfect life Anna and Tom feel increasingly trapped, yearning for an authenticity and a sense of purpose that seem perennially just out of their grasp. With the stylistic mastery of Georges Perec and nihilism of Michel Houellebecq, Perfection, translated by Sophie Hughes, is a sociological novel about the emptiness of contemporary existence, beautifully written, brilliantly scathing.
Perfection
Translated by Sophie Hughes
Published 13 February 2025
French paperback with flaps, 120 pages
Perfection
Translated by Sophie Hughes
0
PRESENT
Sunlight floods the room from the bay window, reflects off the wide, honey-coloured floorboards and casts an emerald glow over the perforate leaves of a monstera shaped like a cloud. Its stems brush the back of a Scandinavian armchair, an open magazine left face-down on the seat. The red of that magazine cover, the plant’s brilliant green, the petrol blue of the upholstery and the pale ochre floor stand out against the white walls, their chalky tone picked up again in the pale rug that just creeps into the frame.
The next picture is of the building’s exterior, an Art Nouveau apartment block with acanthus leaf and citrus fruit cornices. The white render is all but invisible under layers of fluorescent graffiti, tattered posters and peeling paint. On the first floor, you can scarcely make out the stucco gables beneath the grime. The combination of turn-of-the-century luxury and raw modern grittiness lends a feeling of freedom and decadence, with a hint of eroticism. Some of the windows are boarded up with faded chipboard, but in others there are plants and string lights. An ivy cascades from a balcony onto the street below.
The kitchen is fitted out with glossy white subway tiles, a chunky wooden worktop, a double butler’s sink. Open shelves are lined with blue and white enamel dishes and mason jars filled with rice, grains, coffee, spices. Cast iron pans and olive wood ladles hang from a wall-mounted steel bar. Out on display on the worktop are a brushed steel kettle, a Japanese teapot and a bright red blender. The windowsill is filled with herbs growing in terracotta pots: basil, mint, chives, but also marjoram, winter savory, coriander, dill. Pushed against one wall is an antique marble-top pastry table and salvaged school chairs. They are lit by an accordion wall-light mounted between a botanical lithograph of an araucaria and a reproduction print of a British wartime poster.
Next, the living room, where a jungle of low-maintenance, luxuriant plants shelter in the nook of the bay window: the lush monstera stretching its shiny leaves towards the outside world, a fiddle-leaf fig almost touching the ceiling from its huge faux-concrete pot, trailing ivies and hanging peperomia on display across two wall shelves, and string of pearls and Chinese money plants whose tangled foliage reaches all the way to the floor. In one corner, arranged on a collection of stools and upturned boxes, is a miniature forest of alocasias, giant euphorbias, weeping figs, downy-stemmed philodendrons, strelitzias and dieffenbachias. Through the French window you can make out a balcony with two chairs around a small table, a porcelain ashtray and some string lights.
The reverse perspective shows the rest of the room: a low sofa and Danish curved mahogany armchair upholstered in petrol blue textured cotton; a herringbone tweed blanket; an exposed lightbulb with a twiddly filament hanging from a midnight blue fabric cable; a black metal side table with past issues of Monocle and the New Yorker stacked beside a brass candle holder and a glass bowl filled with fruit. Next, a rolltop wooden sideboard displaying spider plant cuttings in glass jars of water, an avocado seed just starting to sprout, and a vinyl record player; two floorstanding speakers connected to an amplifier on a low wall shelf; above that, an LP collection with a few prized pieces facing outwards (a limited edition In Rainbows, a first edition Kraftwerk); a dracaena casting a shadow like a spindly hand; a Primavera Sound poster.
Tying it all together is a sandy-coloured Berber rug with a fine geometric pattern. On either side of the room there are facing double doors, stripped but with the odd streak of pistachio paint still visible. The doors are closed, which gives the modest space a cosy, homely, almost stuffy feel. It is a room for low-lit, hushed conversations on winter evenings. But in the following picture, those same four doors, now wide open, offer a view of the connecting rooms, and the perspective is lengthened again by the line of the hardwood floorboards.
The room on the left is a home office set up for two. Inside it, a large white melamine blockboard desk with hairpin legs is arranged as facing workstations: each holds a monitor, a wireless keyboard, an Anglepoise lamp and a pair of over-ear headphones in garish colours. One of the workstations has a seventies swivel chair with a moulded plywood seat, the other a wooden ergonomic kneeling chair with black upholstery. The back wall has floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with paperbacks and graphic novels, most in English, interspersed with illustrated coffee table books – monographs on Noorda and Warhol, Tufte’s series on infographics, the Taschen history of typefaces, and another Taschen on the entryways of Milan. In the place of bookends there are succulents in cement plant pots, a waist-level camera, a few boardgames – Scrabble, Risk, Catan. Over in one corner you can make out a router and an A3 printer.
There is only one picture of the bathroom, which has a single slit window but is nonetheless bright, thanks to all the reflective surfaces. A lush trailing ivy drapes itself across the window from the curtain pole, picking out the dazzling green of the mosaic floor tiles, which also run up the side of the inset bath. On a cylindrical cabinet with sliding doors the eye is drawn along a skyline of little bottles and vials, all by different brands but with similar labels in white, pink or light grey, the names printed in lightweight sans serif fonts.
On the opposite side of the living room there is a bedroom with an extra-deep double mattress resting on a tatami base. The headboard is hidden from view by four oversize pillows, and the duvet is spread with a vintage quilt, the only splash of colour among the creamy bed- linen, white walls and pale yellow tatami. There are two reading lights, one on either side of the bed – slim metal cylinders with more decorative bulbs; two symmetrical clothes stands on either side of an antique travel trunk; a yoga mat rolled up in one corner beside some dumbbells and a resistance band. All but one of the pictures are brightly lit and in focus: it’s of the same bedroom but now in semi-darkness, the curtains drawn, the walls streaked with that orangey light that filters into a room when you wake up late and the sun is already high, and maybe it’s a Sunday, or maybe it’s not.
The life promised by these images is clear and purposeful, uncomplicated.
It is a life of coffees taken out on the east-facing balcony in the spring and summer while scrolling New York Times headlines and social media on a tablet. The plants are watered as part of a daily routine that also includes yoga and a breakfast featuring an assortment of seeds. There is work to be done at a laptop, of course, but at a pace more befitting an artist than an office worker: between intense bursts of concentration at their desk there might be a walk, a videocall with a friend who has a new idea for a project, some jokes exchanged on social media, a quick trip to the nearby farmer’s market. They are long days – altogether, the working hours probably exceed those of an office worker – and yet, unlike in an office, here no one is counting hours, because in this life work plays an important role without being an obligation or burden. On the contrary, work is a source of growth and creative stimulation, the bassline to the tune of leisure.
But it is also a life with room for joy, which is clear from every little detail. The long days are followed by a mandatory hour offline to go out for a drink or flick through a magazine while curled up on the sofa, shielded from the cold. Beauty and pleasure seem as inextricable from daily life as particles suspended in a liquid.
And it is a happy life, or so it seems from the pictures in the post advertising the apartment for short-term rental at one hundred and eighteen euros a day, plus the fee to cover the Ukrainian cleaner, paid through a French gig economy company that files its taxes in Ireland; plus the commission for the online hosting platform, with offices in California but tax-registered in the Netherlands; plus another cut for the online payments system, which has its headquarters in Seattle but runs its European subsidiary out of Luxembourg; plus the city tax imposed by Berlin.
(…)
‘This book gives startling form to the question of how to live a meaningful life; to the illusion that appearance is beauty; to the restlessness of contemporary society. I read it in a breath and I was captivated.’
— Ayşegül Savaş, author of The Anthropologists
‘Perfection is a jewel of a novel: precisely cut, intricately faceted, prismatically dazzling at its heart. Vicenzo Latronico is the finest of writers.’
— Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds
‘Perfection is a generation-defining piece of literature, one that spares us nothing. To read it is to look in a mirror and finally, for the first time, truly see yourself and the culture you’ve helped create: the one that lurks behind the filters, algorithms and curated ephemera of selfhood that make up our public lives. Read it and tremble.’
— Madeleine Watts, author of Elegy, Southwest
‘Vincenzo Latronico is a writer who sees clearly and conveys it beautifully. In Perfection, he paints a stark picture of the conditions that have created a generation’s “identical struggle for a different life”: globalization, homogenization, the internet. Though on one level the novel is (pitch-perfectly) “about” Berlin and the “creative professional” expatriates who have sought a different life in, and inevitably colonized, the city, the story of Anna and Tom will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to resist the flattening effects of whatever life is now. I can’t recommend it highly enough.’
— Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts
‘The world of this horrifying novel has been built piece by perfect piece – honey-colored floorboards, a monstera’s perforate leaves, glossy white tiles, a breakfast of assorted seeds, a game of Carcassonne – the method of its construction likewise perfect, a perfection of prose that ends by releasing, miraculously, the very thing perfection is made to prohibit, the heavy stink of mortality.’
— Kathryn Davis, author of Aurelia, Aurélia
‘I recognize Anna and Tom in Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection because I am them. Never has a novel so incisively captured what it feels like to participate in the globalized culture of the Internet era: to consume it; to be overwhelmed by it; to try, futilely, to make it. The repeating symbols of homogenized good taste – potted house plants, reclaimed-wood furniture, post-industrial clubs – haunt the characters as their own poignant hopes to be original. I felt attacked, as they say online. Perfection is satire in the way that adult life itself is a comedy. By its end, the novel will cure you of any dream for authenticity.’
— Kyle Chayka, author of The Longing for Less
‘One of Europe’s most talented young writers, Latronico has written the great Berlin novel we’ve all been waiting for.’
— Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker staff journalist
‘An important novel, innovative in its own way.’
— Claudia Durastanti, author of Strangers I Know
‘Sharp and revelatory. Latronico is a brilliant and fearless writer. I recommend this novel to every reader I meet.’
— Ellena Savage, author of Blueberries
‘A new master of Italian literature.’
— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
‘Perfection masterfully updates Georges Perec’s masterpiece Les Choses.’
— Rivista Studio
Vincenzo Latronico was born in Rome in 1984 and currently lives in Berlin. He is an art critic and has translated many books into Italian, by authors such as George Orwell, Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hanif Kureishi. Perfection is his fourth novel, the first to be translated into English.
Sophie Hughes is the translator of over twenty novels by authors such as Fernanda Melchor, Alia Trabucco Zerán and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, and the Valle Inclán Prize, and in 2021 she was awarded the Queen Sofía Translation Prize. She lives in Trieste.
